Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.

thought I was doing two things. One is inquiring into the phenomenon of revelation, if you are not a religious person. But, clearly, it's a sincere phenomenon.

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second, or one sixteenth, or one one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth. Snap your fingers; a snapshot's faster.

Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.

The west was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.

I always thought storytelling was like juggling [...] You keep a lot of different tales in the air, and juggle them up and down, and if you're good you don't drop any.

If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.